“Elevator’s a trap,” he murmured. “Too slow, too enclosed. We take the stairs.”
Marcus made a sound between his teeth, and Damian’s hand found my shoulder for half a second — not romantic, not even personal, just an anchor, one person telling another stay with me — before he shifted Marcus’s weight more fully onto himself.
“Nora. Go ahead of us. Open the fire door. If anyone’s on the other side who isn’t wearing a green armband, you drop and you get behind me. Understood?”
“Understood.”
I didn’t know, until I was moving, that I could move that fast. Fear did something strange to the body I had spent years apologizing for — it didn’t make me small, it made me sure. My hand hit the crash bar of the fire door and I shouldered it open into a wash of cold, wet air and the noise of the storm outside, louder now than the gunfire, or maybe just closer to my own ears.
No one was there. Just rain, and the dark shape of the kitchen garden, and beyond it, the tree line.
“Clear,” I called back, and Damian appeared with Marcus a moment later, blood-slicked and breathing hard, and for the first time all night I saw something on his face that looked almost like relief.
“There’s a gatehouse a quarter mile through the trees,” he said. “My driver, if he’s still breathing, will be waiting there with the car we don’t advertise. Can you run?”
I looked down at myself — at the body that had spent a decade being told, implicitly and explicitly, that it wasn’t built for anything but standing quietly out of the way — and I thought of every time someone’s eyes had flicked over me and decided, before I’d said a word, what I was and wasn’t capable of.
“Watch me,” I said.
Something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed Damian’s mouth. “Lead the way, Nora.”
We ran into the rain and the dark, into the trees, with a wounded man between us and a burning house behind us, and I understood, somewhere in the animal part of my brain that wasn’t thinking in words anymore, only in motion — that whatever happened after tonight, I would never again be the woman who apologized for taking up space in a van.
